A multitude of portable devices including cellular phones, personal media devices, and laptops are widely used and commercially available. These devices continue to become more popular as demand for improved devices continues to grow. As market trends move towards smaller devices in an effort to enhance portability, device components are collaterally constrained to meet market requirements. At the same time, consumers are demanding a multitude of applications for use with portable consumer electronics, such as internet, radio, television, communications, and others. As trends in consumer demands move towards multi-application portable electronic devices, component manufacturers are required to meet new requirements, and therefore develop novel solutions to satisfy consumer demands.
Because portability is an ongoing necessity in the portable electronics market, size constraints must remain a primary focus of component manufactures. Cell phones, for example, are becoming smaller in size and lighter in weight while providing an increased number of useable features, such as internet, radio, television, communications, and others. To meet the demand for multi-application cell phones, additional and/or larger antennas and other components are required. Cell phone and other portable electronic device manufacturers are moving toward reducing size of components and unnecessary bulk space, and reusing space.
Antennas, specifically, have been a major focus of reducing size and space in electronic portable devices. Recently, FM radio and DVB-H TV reception have become requirements in a large number of mobile phones and similar wireless communications devices. Antenna performance is a key parameter for quality reception. Mobile handsets are very small compared to wavelengths at FM, DVB-H, VHF-III, and UHF-IV/V frequencies. Consequently, the antennas used for these applications on handsets will be electrically small. These electrically small antennas will tend to be narrow band and require low loss matching techniques to preserve efficiency. One major problem is that multiple electrically small antennas being embedded in a small wireless device will tend to couple, thereby degrading performance. The reduced volume allowed for an internal antenna coupled with the strict requirement that the internal FM and DVB-H. VHF and UHF TV antennas must not interfere with the main communications antenna or other ancillary antennas in the handset makes the task of integrating these antennas into mobile devices quite difficult.
Current market-available antenna designs and prior art antennas are not suitable for overcoming the aforementioned problems. Taking into consideration the requirements for the next generation of devices along with the deficits of current technologies, a solution is needed which achieves efficiency from an antenna required to cover the large FM frequency band. Antennas commonly known and available which generally cover the whole frequency range tend to display inadequate antenna radiation efficiency at a fixed volume.
There is an immediate need for an improved antenna which will provide efficient operation over FM, DVB-H, VHF, and UHF TV frequencies while minimizing the volume required in the device. There is a need for such an antenna that will further not interfere with other antennas or wireless components in the portable device. Furthermore, there is a need to simplify the method for integrating the low frequency antenna with the mobile device to reduce design time and time to market.